Day 33

It rained hard last night, and continued through the early morning. It felt like it was going to be here all day, but things change very quickly here, and the clouds broke and the sun came out mid-morning.

We went to Samana today, for carnaval. Carnaval happens every Sunday in February, and the last Sunday is the largest (most official?) carnaval. We took a taxi from the gua-gua stand in Las Galeras. The guy we negotiated with had a gun packed in his pants. He told us carnaval started at 3:00. When we arrived, around 2:40, there wasn’t much going on. We asked someone else what time carnaval started, and he said 4:00. We walked around a bit, and decided to sit in a café, out of the sun. While there I asked a man what time carnaval started – he said 6:00.

When we first saw carnaval in Samana last year, the practice that caught our eye was the “whompers.” I’ll look up the official Spanish name somewhere, but they originated as inflated goat bladders, which are tied to a string. The teenaged boys all have one and, at the first carnaval we witnessed, they were in costumes for a parade. As the parade ended the costumed teenaged boys all started running around and hitting women in the butt with the whompers. In the reading I’ve been doing on the DR, each community has standards for whomper use – some hit in the butt only, others allow hits on the entire body, and some are reknowned for the ferocity of their hitting. Lane got hit very hard – she was unsuspecting of being a target – and had a cruel introduction to the world of boy-girl relations.
The carnaval at Samana features rides like those found at most county and town fairs back in the states in my childhood. In fact, the rides look like they might be the same rides used from my childhood, having been sold to someone in the DR after they could no longer pass safety inspections in the US. They are rusty and creaky, and we were wary to ride on any of them until we witnessed others riding, and surviving, them. Lane, Benjamin, Brad, and Walker rode on a car ride, the ferris wheel, and the swinging chairs. I rode on the ferris wheel. Each ride had a long wait to start, as it took the people operating the rides some time to get everyone seated and re-position the bubble gum. Once they started, the rides were opened up full, and went for a long time, guaranteeing each of us a full centrifugal force experience.

Carnaval at Samana is one of the rare times in my experience that there are more – much more – black faces than white faces in the crowd. And the Dominican features so many varieties and shades of color – the book I’m reading on the history of relations between Haiti and the DR tells of both countries having regulations at one time classifying citizens by color percentage, and those lists being at least 25 designations long, for example, someone with 90% mulatto blood and 1/18th white blood having a certain designation, so they wouldn’t be confused with their neighbor who has 3/32nds Spanish blood, 53% African blood, and is a distant relative of Pat Boone.

I saw our gua-gua driver during carnaval, parked by the side of the road, with he and his co-driver playing hand held musical instruments to the CD that was blaring from their vehicle. On the ride to Samana, he had mentioned something to his co-driver - we only heard the word "Americano" - and the co-driver removed the Dominican music CD and inserted a CD of 1970's American soft rock hits - Leo Sayer and the BeeGees were featured. When we rode back, we asked him about music, and he told us about some live music that was played in Samana every Saturday night at 10. He also told us he carried a gun because he was a gua-gua driver and "you never knew."

We stopped at the pizza place on the outskirts of town on our way back. We have been told this is the “italian” pizza place, as opposed to the “french” pizza place in town. When we got there, Walker and I had to go to the bathroom, and we headed to the doors with “caballeros” and “damas” on them. We entered to find a pile of rubble, with no visible plumbing fixtures. I though it was one of those quaint third world bathrooms, so I told Walker to go ahead and pee. While he was going, the waitress came up and told me no, no, no – the bathroom was around the back of the restaurant. Oops. We walked around the back of a building in back of the restaurant, and into a door in this building. I saw a bathroom, but it was obviously someone’s private home. I went anyways, not knowing how hard it would be to find the official bathroom and hoping someone wasn’t in the bedroom on the other side of the bathroom.